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May 17, 2026

Good News, Plain Text, and a Little Gopher Hole

A quick behind-the-scenes look at why Your Good News now offers plain-text and Gopher versions of the site, plus a few exciting community updates.

Your Good News - Gopher Edition

As anyone who knows me can tell you, I am a nerd through and through. Or maybe I actually like what ChatGPT said about me when I asked whether I am a nerd or a geek:

[!CHATGPT QUOTE]
But the best label is probably:

Practical systems nerd.

You are not a “trivia nerd” or a “fandom geek” first. You are the type who sees a messy real-world problem and immediately starts turning it into a system, workflow, philosophy, website, script, publishing model, or business structure.

So, in plain terms:

Nerd by operating system. Geek by enthusiasm. Builder by instinct.

Finally, someone who gets me. :)

My borderline obsession with making this site about content first led me to make a plain-text version of every page. On every article page, there is a “Versions” line just below the author’s name. Click on TXT and you can read the article as a plain-text file. You can also add /index.txt to the end of any URL on the site and see the plain-text version of that page:

https://www.yourgood.news/stories/finding-the-good/index.txt

You can use a text-based browser like Lynx, and that will get you pretty close to the experience of traversing a plain-text website. But it still was not quite what I wanted. It was close, but not truly native plain text because, at the end of the day, Lynx is still rendering HTML.

And that is all well and good. However, my nerd side cannot leave well enough alone.

What I wanted was for you, the reader, to have the experience of reading the website and never hitting any HTML. In a word, what I wanted was Gopher.

You can read Cameron Kaiser’s Why is Gopher Still Relevant? article here.

Gopher has been around since the early 1990s and predates the World Wide Web.

The Gopher version of the site can be found here:

gopher://go4.yourgood.news/

In other news, we will have two more contributing writers to announce as soon as we can. Exciting times, and I cannot wait to spill the beans.

Also, check out our Events calendar. We had two submissions this week for June.

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    Your Good News


A plain-text community news experiment.